Monday, April 03, 2006

Did You Ever Know That You're My Hero?

I hope the self-congratulatory, self-righteous, and completely unhinged rant from Lu Laoshi in today's Moscow-Pullman Daily News means we are finally approaching the end of the anti-Wal-Mart jihad in Pullman. Martyrdom and Paradise await the faithful. His knowledge of business and economics is embarassing, even for a Liberal Arts professor.

These "heroes" have cost Pullman and its citizens hundreds of thousands of dollars and incalculable damage to our reputation as a place in which to do business. In return for what? The "heroes" have lost at every turn. "Moral imperative" or "tilting at windmills"? You decide. The ideological zealots of PARD all need to take a permanent "group trip" out of town.

WARNING: Read no further if you have a weak stomach.

I recently went on a group trip with others from Pullman whom I had never met and, in getting to know each other, we chatted about various local issues.

Eventually the subject of the Wal-Mart boondoggle came up. Nobody favored it. I mentioned that I was involved with the Pullman Alliance for Responsible Development. "You are heroes," one person said. As flattering as that may be, I must say fighting Wal-Mart is not a pleasure but a moral imperative.

One of the most important reasons is precisely cost: there is a wasteland of local blight where Wal-Mart has laced the countryside with super centers. Wal-Mart has the bad taste to bulldoze right up to the border of an otherwise tranquil and hallowed cemetery. They could not care less about school kids who play and the elderly who live nearby their retail colossus. Their greed has motivated them to plan building two bloated stores within a few miles of each other. Combined, there would be enough floor space in the two proposed super centers for every person in the Moscow-Pullman region to camp inside comfortably.

With all this new retail space, how will Wal-Mart make money? They won't. They don't plan to. They'll set prices low, squeeze the market, and absorb their losses in the corporation. When all the local businesses are crushed, they'll be the ones deciding what the prices will be. While the business practices will remain "everyday low," the prices won't. It's called monopoly capitalism and Wal-Mart engages in it every day. Anyone who loves the blight that Wal-Mart causes should take a long trip through the swaths the behemoth has already cut into middle America. That's the story that Wal-Mart and its surrogates don't want you to know.

I bet he puts pictures of himself around his house and office just so he can admire himself all the time. Do you think he has one in a super-hero cape? It probably has a snap, because he has two broken arms from patting himself on the back.